The Festival of Freedom

As many of you know, November 9th was the 20th anniversary of the fall of the Berlin wall. Conveniently enough we live in Berlin, so we got to see some of the events first hand!

I'm not sure what people heard in other countries, but one of the things that they did to celebrate was build a "domino wall" throughout the city. Different 13th grade classes in the former East and West Germany were invited to create a piece of the wall, including a class from my school.

Here you can see the piece that they made. What was especially cool was their piece was sponsored by the American Embassy here and the class got to meet Hilary Clinton! There are some pictures here from a local newspaper with pictures of them with her.

Anyway, so they put pieces of the walls back to back and this went from the Brandenburg Gate in a few different directions. Linnea, with some other English teaching assistants, went to the Festival of Freedom, as they called in, to see all of the happenings a.k.a. see them knock all the pieces down.


This was Linnea's view of the Brandenburg Gate. As you can see it was packed. If you look close enough you can see the giant screen where they showed all the speeches and musical guests, so that everyone could see what was going on. Unfortunately the weather was quite cold and rainy, but it was certainly manageable.


Proof that Linnea didn't just steal some one else's pictures :) You can see some of the pieces of the wall behind her.


This is what it looked like with all the pieces of the wall lined up.


Some pieces more up close. You can see that they the crowds were separated from the pieces with a gate and then they had people in silver coats (on the right) who were patrolling the in between area.

There were also special guests that came! The leaders of Germany, France, Russia, and Great Britain As mentioned before, Hilary Clinton was in Berlin and above is a very blurry picture of her during her speech.


Obama couldn't make it, for whatever reason (a lot of people found it a bit odd and even disrespectful) but! he recorded a speech and sent it with Clinton.

Beyond just political leaders, they also had celebrities, authors, and musicians come. For example Bon Jovi was there, as well as Muhammed Yunus (above) who is essentially the inventor of microlending.

After many speeches, interviews, and musical performances the time came for all of the wall to be knocked down. It was very dramatic- with a countdown and everything and this:


is the aftermath!

And to end the whole night there were fireworks, of which I only have video. But I'm glad that I got to be there as this was definitely a once in a life time opportunity :)

Unsere neue Wohnung!

Pictures!

I figured I'd give a brief background to our new pad. We now live on Beethovenstraße (Beethoven Street), which is one street over from Mozartstraße (Mozart Street) and down the street from the national music archives. An additional piece of random information is that we also live a short walk from the residence of the Libyan ambassador.

We're renting our apartment from a mathematician, who reminds me very much of my father. He has usually rented it out to doctoral candidates, but there hasn't been money to finance any, so the apartment has been empty for almost a year. It was partially furnished, but he figures he can rent it out as fully furnished once we leave, so he's basically been buying us a bunch of new stuff, like new pots and pans, a new bed, and kitchen utensils. Basically, we found a super awesome deal.


I thought that I would begin this photo tour of our new apartment with the view from our balcony. Because we have a balcony!

As you can see, autumn is is full bloom here and the trees (both outside of our window and lining the streets) look beautiful. I'm sure if it ends up snowing a bunch this winter (though our first snow fall happened earlier this week!) our view will be equally picturesque. I've really enjoyed being able to just sit in the apartment and watch the leaves fall off the trees. It's an amazingly soothing activity and makes me kind of wish I had apple cider (though I suppose I could make that myself...).


Here you can see our desk and bookshelf. Conveniently situated right be the window allowing for optimal out-of-the-window staring. You can also see our two plants! The one on the right is a basil plant that started dying as soon as I brought it home (sigh), but on the left in the yellow pot is a succulent given to us by Amanda, another English teaching assistant, as a house warming present! Amanda is super awesome and will do doubt be a common character in this blog :)


The apartment is one bedroom with a separate hallway, bathroom, and kitchen and thus our bedroom is also our living and dining room. Here we have our kitchen table, conveniently purchased previously at Ikea. While Ikea (pronounced Ee-kay-uh since we're in Germany) is pretty awesome and the stuff looks cool, the product quality is sometimes... lacking. So, I demonstrated my handy-woman skills this week with wood glue after several of the pieces of the chair broke/ decided to not stay in their designated holes. The high quality German wood glue was provided by Stefan, another individual who will no doubt pop up on here from time to time.

Our tour will end for today with the kitchen (we do have a bed, I promise!).



Our kitchen is small, but sweet. Here you can see some of our new pots and pans and our oven. Also the largest cabinet on the left is actually our super camouflaged refrigerator.

Now at this point, I wanted to add more pictures, but blogger isn't letting me. Perhaps there's a picture limit? Perhaps I've uploaded too big of files? I suppose I will just have to make another post in the very near future with more pictures and such.

All the same, we love our new apartment, are super excited to be settled in and are very happy with life right now :)

We're all moved!

As I think any one who is reading this knows, we found our own apartment and are all moved in. This post won't have any pictures from our new place, mostly because our internet situation is a bit precarious at the moment, but! hopefully I'll be able to take and put up some tonight.

Our new place is in Lankwitz, which means that we now officially live in Berlin. The town is quiet and very neighborhood-like with lots of trees and cobble stone streets. The man we are renting from found it a bit odd that two student aged individuals would want to live in a relatively boring and non-"trendy" part of Berlin, but Arran and I love it. My commute time has increased significantly, but I think that is the only downside and it is something I'm more than willing to work through.

I'll wait to talk more about specifics when I actually have pictures to post, but I can put up a few pictures from the last (almost!) two months that my teacher took.

Shuffling cards at a birthday party, which everyone was very impressed with.

My teacher and I at the Oranienburg Garden Show.

Arran and I eating like knights the first weekend we got to Germany.